Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Tante.cc writes about Cory using an 'Drunk Uncle' style argument to defend his LLM usage (and go after the left using strawmans).
(To counter one of Cory's arguments, If disliking LLMs was just about the people who run it, people against it would have have stayed in sneerclub).
saw a family member today for the first time in three years. they immediately told me "with your background bro you should just go work in AI and get super rich."
told them that the ai shit doesn't work and that everything involving LLMs is downright unethical. they respond
"i had a boss that gave me the best advice: you can either be right or you can be rich."
recently, i saw someone use the phrase "got my bag nihilism" and i feel it really captures the moment. i just don't understand how people can engage in this kind of behavior and even live with themselves, let alone ooze pride. it's repulsive.
(family member later outright admitted that his job is basically selling things to companies that they don't need.)
I unfortunately do understand. I think there are severe tradeoffs between living a good life and living a virtuous life. Most people usually compromise to lesser or greater degree and find ways to cope with that. Nihilism is one way.
To be fair it is really, really mentally taxing to be a young person who cares. You're surrounded by a world that doesn't. Everything is constructed to reward you if you simply stop. The effort to care is immense and the rewards are meager. The impact you can have on the world is so, so limited by your wealth, and wealth comes so, so easy if you just stop caring.
But you can't. I mean, you can't. If you stopped you wouldn't be you anymore, it would destroy your soul. But it is gnawing. You could do the grift just for a bit. Save up $10k, maybe $20k. That's life-changing money. How much good would it do to your family? Maybe you can forget that there are other families, ones you can't see, that would be hurt. Well no. You can't. You are better than that. And for that you will suffer.
i don't think of myself as a young person (i'm closer to 40 than 30), but i agree with the sentiment. i often worry that it's just don quixote energy and the windmills aren't going to thank me when i'm in the ground with work experience that employers look at and scoff. 🤷
A worldview where one's worth is measured by the balance in their bank account makes it really easy to flatten out morality.
Do you want Tylers Durden? Because this is how you get Tylers Durden.
OpenSlopware documents FOSS that sold out to LLMs. is there an opposite of it, a hall of fame to list software that has unambiguously and vocally rejected LLM code like the Zig programming language?
Quick TL;DR of my Discord Age Verification Experience™:
Using my face multiple times didn't work due to the AV shitting itself inside out, but setting my DOB via Family Center somehow did it
Absolute fucking clown fiesta, Jesus Christ
How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science | Nature h/t naked capitalism
One reason for the boom is that LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity, by as much as 89.3%, according to research published in Science in December.
Let's not call it "productivity" - to quote Bergstrom, twice as many papers is not the same as twice as much science.
There was an underlying tension with an academia, and a society, that takes "productivity" by itself as an end goal, and the autogenerators are just the logical conclusion/extreme form of that. The tiny part of of me that can still be optimistic hopes that this leads to a real good reexamination of what academia (and society) is even for.
Goodhart's law in action.
Since the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022, the number of monthly submissions to the arXiv preprint repository has risen by more than 50% and the number of articles rejected each month has risen fivefold to more than 2,400 (see ‘Rejection rates climb’).
If I'm interpreting this right then the growth in the number of rejections is wildly outpacing the growth in submissions, which means not only are we getting a tsunami of slop but that the bad papers are actively chasing away good ones.
Also your paper has to be truly irredeemable dogshit to get rejected from arxiv. Like you can post proofs of P=NP as long as it sounds kinda coherent. 2400 monthly rejections is absurd.
WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out (because the AI datacentres have stolen them all)
idk if the bubble will pop or slowly deflate, but im certain that in 10 years we'll look back at 2020s as the decade where tech stopped progressing in the way we know it - since we're diverting all our resources to ai, there's no longer any room left for anything else to grow
the 2010s crypto gpu shortage was the warning siren for this. it really hampered the growth of gpus because they permanently became so much more expensive - now the same is happening to memory, storage, and...well, gpus again! we've reached the point of reverse progress
2020s as the decade where tech stopped progressing in the way we know it
I mean, sure, but I think the underlying cause here is the end of Moore's law and exponential growth of potential userbases as the world becomes fully connected. The Enshittocene can be viewed as a consequence of capital's attempts to continue exponential growth while the fundamentals are no longer capable of sustaining it.
Indeed, fifteen years ago, Thailand had a horrific tsunami-induced flood displacing millions of people, and:
Thailand is the world's second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world's production. Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital's, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives. … As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover. Due to the price increase, Western Digital reported a 31 percent revenue increase and a more than doubled profit for fiscal year 2012.
As you say, we are no longer earning Moore's Dividend and there is no longer opportunity in laying dark fiber for somebody else to rent or offering Facebook-only phones to reach the next billion users.
womp, and wait for it, womp
This was not such an effective venture.
Rip the stately home.
I mean it's presumably still standing, just with a slightly cheaper set of owners ;)
Good news, everyone’s favorite emacs is using AI now: https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php
can somebody tell me whether neovim is selling out to LLMs or led by transphobes or getting money from Anduril or something, so I decide whether to switch before getting disappointed again
somebody did show me neovim's AI-assisted PR tag. nice, I can get disappointed all in one go instead of once per day
I poked around to see how far gone my main text editor is. They're not about to join the Butlerian Jihad, but I think I can live with it.
We don't care how you wrote the code, but we do care that you fully(!) understand it and how it solves the underlying issue. LLM coding assistants can help with tedious routine and investigation (such as constructing test cases), but they are not a replacement for understanding the problem as well as the code you touch. (Nvim's codebase is full of... let's say "history", and generic models tend to do quite poorly here.)
What is not OK is to copy-paste responses from the LLM as your comments. We don't want to play a game of telephone with the LLM (if it was smart enough to solve the problem, we would be doing that ourselves).
Except in special circumstances (and with explicit notes), all your comments and descriptions must be written by you yourself. (Use a translation tool if you must, but don't let someone else put words in your mouth.)
Contributor actually was bullied into closing his PR, but maintainers reopened and merged it, as the change was fine apparently. Lol
disapointamaxxing
@antifuchs @techtakes Oh goodie they enshittified vim IS NOTHING SACRED?!? HAVE WE LIVED AND FOUGHT IN VAIN?!?!?
It looks more like they used an LLM (Copilot) to construct programs using the new features in the language.
So more "hop on the bandwagon using LLMs to advertise" rather than "we used LLMs to develop"
OTOH "these new features are so advanced you need AI to use them" is a bit of a weird sell
it has to be said, a runtime CVE in vim would be pretty embarrassing
